{"id":40,"date":"2004-06-26T18:19:08","date_gmt":"2004-06-27T02:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=23"},"modified":"2004-06-26T18:19:08","modified_gmt":"2004-06-27T02:19:08","slug":"pascals-wager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2004\/06\/26\/pascals-wager\/","title":{"rendered":"Pascal&#039;s Wager"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.evangelicaloutpost.com\/archives\/000729.html\" title=\"the evangelical outpost: <center>Wagering a Life:<\/center> <center>Part 2 %u2013 Pascal%u2019s Wager and the Rational Gambler<\/center>&#8220;>The Evangelical Outpost<\/a> presents an interesting series of posts on probability and Pascal&#8217;s Wager.  Being a game theory kind of guy, I find his proofs interesting.  However, one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/pascal-wager\/#5\">criticisms<\/a> of the Wager, to me, is more compelling:  even if the many assumptions underlying the Wager are correct (which is quite debateable), the best strategy is a <em>mixed <\/em> strategy rather than an either \/ or choice.  This, I think, is exactly the strategy most &#8220;nominal&#8221; Christians employ.  They aren&#8217;t willing to commit to the faith as life-defining.  Rather, they retain some of the trappings of the faith &#8212; attending church at least periodically, perhaps participating in the Mass or Eucharist &#8212; but it doesn&#8217;t penetrate.  It&#8217;s a lukewarm faith, which really isn&#8217;t any faith at all.  <\/p>\n<p>Pascal&#8217;s insight may be useful to help prompt a sincere seeking.  However, ultimately, true faith requires something like the Kantian leap of faith at some point.  The deepest confirmation of faith comes not from rationalistic formulas, but from the transformation true faith brings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-E","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}